At the end of the first decade of the new millennium a revolution is happening. Don’t look for the instigators, there are none. There’s no fighting in the streets. It’s happened all by itself. Capitalism just stopped ‘working’.

The portent of this change can be evidenced in the way the Charters of the 3 major political parties can no longer be implemented.

The Libs can’t support a ‘free enterprise’ economy where the one that exists is populated with giant, globalised tax-dodging, transfer-pricing, too-big-to-fail, monopoly, conglomerate ‘businesses’.

Labor can’t protect workers where these ‘elephants’ labour arbitrage from country to country.

The Greens can’t advocate for small business, biodiversity and land stewardship when absentee rural agribusiness has taken hold of the land and won’t give it back.

My home, as experienced since 1997. The valley is now surrounded by threats.

To many the end of this ‘accumulation through dispossession’ is no surprise. Eventually there would be nothing left to take.

The prophesies of a new age were there in the 60s. Karl Marx wrote about capitalism’s unavoidable tendency to destroy the economy and the environment (the very basis upon which capitalism rests) as far back as the 1800s. The warning signs of decadence and disruption have always been on full view for those who managed to climb out of a world of denial promulgated by a corporate media of narrow vested interests.

In 1970 the ripples of the Vietnam War had the new generation of young adults looking for a way out. It was a mere two years after the US Charlie Company, Ist Battalion, 20th Infantry Brigade went into the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai and shot all the women and children, destroyed the crops and livestock and then burnt “the fucking place down” as ordered. Two years after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and leading members of the Black Panther movement.

That year, at the age of 16, I was mesmerized by the haunting spiritual lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s pied piper song ‘Woodstock’. The command was unmistakable and irresistible. The children of the Age of Aquarius first hit the street and then ventured further; out onto the roads and highways in droves. Out of the towns and cities and into the winding rural valleys of Tasmania and coastal New South Wales to build mud and stone shacks with our boyfriends and our babies.

“I’m goin to camp out on the land. I’m gonna try and get my soul free… I feel to be a cog in something turning.”

In the old second-hand wooden bookshelf in the back porch I still have my Whole Earth Catalogue with a picture of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome. Hippies seized upon this dome idea as a means for them to quickly construct a cheap dwelling. It worked and then the concept was quickly dropped as a corporate media gained its ultimate monopoly on our thoughts through decades of subversion and unrestrained mergers and acquisitions. A whiff of self-reliance and independence amongst the general population might lead to further realisations.

Buckminster Fuller is described as “a visionary who coined the phrase “Spaceship Earth” and wrote a book on the idea of ‘synergy’: the behaviour of whole systems cannot be predicted by the behaviour of their parts taken separately. My favourite quotation comes from this author. Fuller wrote in 1975:

“We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be brief. Advancing science has now discovered that all the known cases of biological extinction have been caused by overspecialization, whose concentration of only selected genes sacrifices general adaptability. Thus the specialist’s brief for pinpointing brevity is dubious. In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialisation has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialisation breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war.”

His warning went unheeded and the prophesies of war, isolation, confusion and discord turned into reality even as far as the isolated rural valleys of the now aged hippies. Some, like myself, looked out on the clearfelled forests, poisoned land and napalmed soil. I took it as a wake-up call. The values so beautifully espoused in the Green Party’s Charter could not be implemented with simply by lifestyle change after all.

As unpleasant as the prospect is for most of us, there can be no opting out of politics and arguments.

We’ve got to get together sooner or later. We’ve got to talk these local and global problems through. My hope is that the monologue of Parties talking down to people finally becomes a dialogue.

A new kind of mind thus beings to come into being which is based on the development of a common meaning that is constantly transforming in the process of the dialogue.
David Bohm

Well spoken Brenda. We weep with you and actively seek the necessary changes which are so dreadfully needed. Thank you. Buck and Joan

Posted by Buck and Joan Emberg on 30/09/10 at 09:21 AM

A lovely piece of writing Brenda and with a compelling conclusion.
Mike

Posted by Mike Deviot on 30/09/10 at 10:25 AM

Brenda’s voice about the impacts of Tasmania’s plantation industry
must be taken up compassionately and be seen for what it holds as
an argument against an extended plantation estate as well as for
compensation, surely. Thanks Brenda.
CW

Posted by Carol Williams on 30/09/10 at 11:36 AM

Brenda looks like you’ve had a bush fire risk imposed on you.

Posted by alan on 30/09/10 at 04:09 PM

Alan #4:
Looks to me like a problem with weeds and spray drift is also imposed. Running a bulldozer and slasher around a plantation once every three years only spreads weeds. The job is never done at the right time to kill them or stop them going to seed. Then the dozer comes along and spreads the seeds with its blade and tracks.

I think there needs to be a metric created for estimating the true costs associated with maintenance of plantations .... the true cost of being an absentee landholder. Assuming chemical tresspass prohibits the use of herbicides to control weeds, there are a couple of ways to control them. One is to let the neighbours graze cattle. The neighbours are paid by getting their animals fed ... not perfect but pretty good. The other way is to pull the bloody weeds out. If you run an MIS scheme from a city, this means a workforce.

A rate could be calculated for each kilometre of exposed perimeter. How much to pay three people to walk the land with appropriate implements, four times a year to pull and dispose of the weeds. It would get easier as time went on (and we are now talking 50-60 year rotations aren’t we?). And some edges are worse than others.

Given that weeds all sprout at about the same time, the equivalent rate might be given to local community organisations to do the weeding as a fund raiser ... like a timber community mothers’ club or a local church ...

Then the true cost of weeds currently imposed on Brenda and every other neighbour to a plantation would be paid by the entity making the money from their existence.

Working out the cost of defraying fire risk… properly maintained buffers of 100 metres, insurance premiums, bunkers, etc… How does one estimate the price of Preolenna or Ridgely if it goes up in smoke?

Most people were there first and the plantations moved in (... a much bigger elephant than a few tree huggers building in the forest!). Why should these people be left to subsidise corporate bottom lines?

I guess the same reason that the taxpayers baled out the banks, but the banks won’t bale out the taxpayers.
NC

Posted by Neo Conned on 30/09/10 at 11:11 PM

Thanks, guys, for your feedback on my article.

Alan, speaking of the fire risk. This is what the Waratah-Wynyard Council had to say on 18th February 2008 (in response to yet another email to them):

“The Tasmania Fire Service responded to Council’s letter on 31 July 2007 and confirmed that Ms Rosser’s concerns were justified and advised that he had contacted Forest Enterprises requesting that some basic fire management clearing be conducted…”

Except that my concerns went far beyond ‘basic fire management clearing’ and extended to why the bushfire risk assessments are being ignored when they allow plantations 50 metres from a house in the context of their being a 60% chance of being burnt down if the residence is withing 80 metres of a ‘forest’. [The plantation risk is worse than forest.]

We have a plantation on our property but it has been cleared back to at least 100 metres and it will be taken back further. The land will be replanted with fruit and nut trees at the appropriate distance, they’re not such a threat.

I have repeatedly asked the Tasmanian Fire Service and Forest Enterprises to engage in activities that move the trees away from our house. To no avail. In fact, the fire clearing has been subject to maintenance about 4 times in the last 11 years, meaning that most summers the grass is high and regenerating trees grow within this non-fire-buffer.

The plantation trees are blocking access to two creeks and the fire access tracks are blocked with debris from the last windstorm.

Posted by Brenda Rosser on 01/10/10 at 12:23 AM

Notice how David Bartlett’s ‘food bowl’ vision does not include the traditional food bowl of North Western Tasmania? No, his food bowl is an area of poorer soils and less rainfall. Why would that be? It would have nothing to do with the foreign shareholders and foreign joint venture partners that his government slavishly maintains. Bartlett has still not realised that he lost the last election because people are sick of hidden agendas. We don’t believe that our taxes should be propping-up favored industries in the faint hope they may provide a few more jobs than the jobs they destroy. I’m sick of this dim-witted Labor social engineering. David Bartlett is running an administration built on exploiting the uninformed and disengaged population. His master plan is that by the time people realise he was working for foreign interests, he will be long gone.

Posted by Karl Stevens on 01/10/10 at 09:42 AM

“We have a plantation on our property but it has been cleared back to at least 100 metres…”

I should add that the previous owners had already planted this when we purchased this 23 acre property in 1984. Most of the block is native forest, with a big tree lying on the forest floor with Henry Hellyer’s surveying mark still on it. (Henry Hellyer was the first white person to set foot on this land. The original old growth stumps are interspersed between this regenerating 70 year old forest.)

Posted by Brenda Rosser on 01/10/10 at 10:55 AM

Karl Stevens: “Notice how David Bartlett’s ‘food bowl’ vision does not include the traditional food bowl of North Western Tasmania? No, his food bowl is an area of poorer soils and less rainfall…”

I heard a Labor guy (forgot his name) on the radio not long ago saying that Australia shouldn’t bother selling its wheat to poor countries. They don’t have enough money to pay for it. He then went on to say that the land could be grown out for biofuels for Australia instead.

This is the mentality of many of those in power.

A study of the Irish famine orphan might be instructive. The country was exporting food whilst domestically its people were starving. This is what ‘empire’ and ‘capitalism’ is.

To know the true nature of the system we live in is to be out there planting food crops and being as productive as you can be in your spare time.

It is not prudent to buy from large corporations when there are alternatives available. There’s no democracy without economic democracy. There’s no viable planet without the mass of people engaged in sustainable production AT HOME.

“Man is born free and everywhere he is in fast-food chains.” Leunig

Posted by Brenda Rosser on 01/10/10 at 11:04 AM

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Before you submit your comment, please make sure that it complies with Tasmanian Times Code of Conduct.